On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I’ve been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting sooner, your average user can’t be expected to deal with the hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.

Namecheap has a service called Private Email. If you bought your domain with Namecheap and pay for email they set MX records and all the dkim / dmarc stuff for you. It is quite easy and is pretty cheap. I am guessing other domain registrars have a similar feature.

You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.

> I host email through Protonmail

Until Protonmail kicks you off for some vaguely specified reason.

So then you switch your domain to a different provider. Of course, the real trouble is when you loose the actual domain.

Even if you use gmail for your domain’s email, you won’t lose your email address when google bans you. You will have to take an additional step of changing hosts to recover, but you aren’t stuck forever.

At least that’s what I tell myself to avoid doing the work of changing email hosts for my family’s domain.

Using your own domain is not self hosting, you are still using Protonmail's servers to receive and store your emails.

I think that’s their point. They have the benefit of a custom domain and they pay a good provider to host it for them.

I self-host my email on a VPS and have been doing so for many many years. But for a startup that I am a part of, I said we buy mail hosting from Proton mail and so we did.

Probably eventually I will also begin hosting my personal mail with Proton mail because honestly the intermittent deliverability problems that I’ve been having through all these years with my self-hosted mail are a bit of an annoyance. Mostly it happens that I am marked as spam when mailing someone that has never sent mail to me yet. But I don’t send much email with that address anyways, mostly just receive, and rarely to new people, so it hasn’t been a priority.

For a while I was thinking of starting a paid email service of my own, but I just don’t think it’ll be worth the time to try and get into that market. But the idea was that if I was making money from it then I could spend the time to run such a service for many people and have employees to help me run it.

I wonder if government provided personal domains that you could point to popular providers of services using a simple control panel might be a good idea (they could be on a separate tld).